


Early Sunsets Over Monroeville

by I_BERT



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Angst, Blood, M/M, Past Character Death, Vampires, past Grant Morrison/Gerard Way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:42:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27062122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_BERT/pseuds/I_BERT
Summary: If the song Early Sunsets Over Monroeville is a love letter to Dawn of the Dead, then this fic is a love letter to Early Sunsets Over Monroeville. Early Sunsets is my comfort song and I’ve always pictured it as a story with vampires instead of zombies, like the movie.
Relationships: Ray Toro/Mikey Way
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Early Sunsets Over Monroeville

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, this is my first finished MCR fic! I’m really proud of it and I hope you all enjoy it. Kudos are great but comments are the best, I love going thru and responding to them!

“Late dawns and early sunsets / just like my favorite scenes”

The sunset is beautiful. Mikey has almost forgotten how pink and orange it gets. It’s been a few months since he last saw the sun go down - at least in real life and not in one of the movies they’ve retained. He remembers it well, too. He and Ray were holed up in the grocery store looking for anything edible in the donations section. It’s almost always entirely empty, but their garden had been completely ransacked by some vamps a few nights prior and they were running low on food. They’d found a few expired cans of peas. But the walk home was worth it. Gerard hated when they were out so late, even though they all knew the vamps didn’t come out until the sun was fully down. He only lets them go out during sunset if it's absolutely necessary, and always in pairs. Ray had volunteered right away. He loves the colors in the sky while the sun goes down. Mikey’s always the one to accompany him on trips outside. Monroeville had been empty, the houses all boarded up in preparation for nighttime. A total ghost town. And there walked Ray and Mikey, staring at the clouds that looked like they’d been painted by Monet, trying to get back home before dark. Before the vamps would come out.

Tonight isn’t all that different. Other than the fact that they aren’t supposed to be out.

“Then holding hands and life was perfect / just like up on the screen”

Ray squeezes Mikey’s hand. He can tell that Mikey’s nervous. He always can.

“What if Gerard notices we’re gone? He’ll freak out. He’ll assume we’re dead, or turned, or something.” His voice is a little shaky, but Ray's hand holding Mikey's acts as an anchor point and calms him down at least a little bit.

“We’ve got the walkie talkies on us, and he won’t notice we’re gone. We told him we’d be in our room and not to bother us. He never barges in when he thinks we’re having sex, you know that.” Mikey blushes. Ray thinks it’s really fucking cute. “And we’ve got our swords on us. We’ll get there before sunset, but even if anything were to go wrong, we know how to protect ourselves.”

Mikey nods and takes a deep breath. He thinks about the weight of the sword when he holds it. It makes him feel a little safer, at least. When they first started carrying them around - because Grant was the one to figure out that the only way to kill the vamps is a deep enough slit of the throat - Mikey had pictured all the cool movies with swords used as the main weapon. It felt all dramatic when he held his for the first time. They’d found it in an abandoned metal workshop. It was where they all got their weapons. Grant taught them how to use them. Gerard had a lot of fun with it in the beginning, cutting through the air carelessly like they all would see in movies. Mikey smiles at the memory and tightens his grip on Ray's hand.

“Yeah. Okay. Still nervous, though.” He says.

“And the whole time while always giving / Counting your face among the living”

“We’ll be okay. We planned this, remember? Wanna go over the plan again?” Ray knows that just repeating things helps Mikey relax. He nods.

“We go through the mall. Top floor. Crash in the emergency safe room. Come out when the sun is up, and head back home.” Mikey breaths through it. His lungs fill and he feels better.

“Exactly. Everything's gonna be okay. I love you.” Ray brings their joined hands up and kisses the back of Mikey’s. Mikey looks up at big brown eyes and a warm smile all framed by curly hair. He leans up and kisses Ray. They stay there for a moment. “Okay, we’ve gotta be on our way. We’re close to the mall.”

“Up and down escalators, pennies and colder fountains”

The vamps almost never go into the mall. They get confused easily, they don’t like risking getting lost and not being able to crawl back to the underground before the sun comes back up. Still, the building has safe rooms to go into as soon as the night starts. Rooms with no windows, locks covering the door, some pillows and blankets. The nicest one is on the top floor.

Mikey and Ray discovered it one day while searching for new clothes. There was a mattress on the floor, a fuzzy rug, and a bathroom attached to it. Most of the safe rooms were made by random people who liked to have an emergency backup plan in case they got stuck somewhere and wouldn’t be able to make it home before sundown. Mikey feels bad about borrowing someone’s, but Ray promised it was no big deal.

The escalators are broken, just like everything else in the city, but they work just fine as stairs. There's a light pink tint over everything that the sunset is touching through the windows.  
They walk past an old fountain in the center of the building. There's no water in it, but there are a few coins, mostly pennies, scattered around at the bottom. Mikey lets go of Ray's hand for a moment and goes to pick one up. It’s old, of course, from before the vamps came. It’s almost rubbed smooth. Mikey remembers being little and tossing pennies into fountains and making a wish. He never really believed it made anything come true, but Gerard did. Gerard had a lot of hope for things before the vamps came. Before they killed Grant, really.

“Elevators and half price sales, trapped in by all these mountains.”

“Come on, one more floor.” Ray calls. Mikey pockets the penny and follows him to the stairs. He’s nervous about being out so late, but there’s no turning back now. They wouldn’t make it home before dark.

Mikey sees Ray glancing around. At all the things that used to be there, no doubt. The banners that read “Buy one get one free.” advertising for stores that have long since been emptied. The elevators that haven’t worked in years. The skylights that have cracks in them if they’re still intact at all. Mikey has to admit, it is eerie. It always is. No matter how long they’ve been living like this, he’s not sure it’ll ever seem normal to him. How some places are safer than others, but nowhere is really truly safe.

He remembers their last night of normalcy, before all of this. They’d been having a sleepover, Frank staying at Mikey and Gerard’s place.

Mikey shakes his head to focus on the task at hand. There's no point in mourning the past. Frank is always telling them that.

Ray races Mikey up the final escalator to the top floor where the room is. He totally cheats though, starting before the “3, 2, 1,” countdown was up.

“Running away and hiding with you / I never thought they’d find us here”

Mikey reaches the top moments after Ray, but as soon as he gets there he notices something is wrong. Ray is tense, the hair on his arms standing on end. He puts a hand up behind him to signal for Mikey to stop and be silent. His hand slowly goes to his sword. Mikey's stomach drops to his feet, and his heart jumps into his throat. It feels like all his internal organs are going crazy. All he can hear is his pulse.

He doesn’t see anything, but Ray has good instincts, and they need to turn a corner to get to the door. Who knows what could be beyond that corner.

Mikey quietly pulls out his dagger with one hand, grabbing the hilt of his sword with the other. They’ve fought vamps before. That still doesn’t make it any less scary.

Slowly, Ray steps forward. They inch their way towards the corner they’ve got to turn. Suddenly, Mikey can hear it too. The light tip-tap footsteps that only vamps make. The sound of their bare feet on the tile floor. There are multiple.

In a flash of movement, Ray pulls his sword out and jumps forward, shoving Mikey backwards and shouting at him to run in the opposite direction, to find another safe room.

“Not knowing you changed from just one bite”

Mikey lands on his ass. Of course he isn’t running away. Instead, he pulls his sword out and turns the corner. There has to be about six of them, but everything is going too fast for Mikey to be able to count. He jumps into action, slashing and moving as fast as he can so they never have a chance to grab him, to bite him. He sees the safe room just a few feet away from where he’s standing, back to the wall, sword out in front of him.

Mikey reaches over and swings the door open. He’s about to grab Ray’s arm and push them both inside so that they can lock themselves away like they planned in the first place, but then he hears flesh tearing. And a shout. Vamps don’t shout. They don’t feel pain. That's Ray's shout.

Mikey doesn’t let himself believe it. He grabs Ray and rips him out of a vamp’s grip. Mikey pointedly does not look at the blood on Ray's neck.

He shoulders Ray into the room and slams the door, leaving himself out in the mall hallway to fight off the vamps alone. It’s not difficult. All he sees is red and he just starts shouting and slicing through them like it’s nothing, like they’re made of paper. He tries to scream like it’s a war cry, but it sounds like sobs are tearing their way out of him.

Mikey thrusts his sword clean through the neck of the last vamp standing. He pulls back and drops to his knees - starts incessantly stabbing at the corpses on the floor with his dagger. He hears the door behind him open, knows that it’s Ray's hand that gently grabs hold of his shoulder, but he can’t stop. He can’t stop the ugly howls wrenching through his chest, can’t stop his arms from going back down into the dead bodies of vamps scattered around him. They both know what happens next.

“Mikey.” Ray's voice booms from behind him. He stops. He crumples to the floor. He’s in a puddle of dark vamp blood but he’d rather lay here and bawl than get up and face the fact that Ray was just bitten.

Ray was just bitten.

“I fought them all off just to hold you close and tight”

Mikey is vaguely aware of Ray picking him up off the ground and taking him into the safe room, shutting the door behind them. He thinks to himself, distantly, that he should be the one carrying Ray. It’s Ray who was just bitten. Ray who has only forty minutes before the change takes. But he doesn’t know how to do that. He’s never had to carry Ray. Ray has always carried him, everywhere. When they were kids, as teens, when the vamps first got to Pennsylvania. Always. Ray always was the one holding his hand, not the other way around.

Mikey doesn’t ‘snap out of it’, that's not the right phrase. It’s more that when Ray is peeling their blood soaked shirts off and using one of their water bottles to clean up his injury, Mikey realizes that he needs to be helping right now.

He hasn’t stopped crying - nowhere between when he was creating the gory mess outside and when Ray put him down on the mattress in the safe room - but somehow feels like he’s dry of any more tears. He can’t have been crying for that long. It happened fast. But still, his throat feels raw from the severe shrieking he pulled off moments ago.

“Stop, let me take that,” Mikey grabs the wet make-shift cloth (a piece of fabric he ripped from his sleeve) Ray was using to wipe down the bite and starts doing it for him. He makes Ray lay back on the mattress and starts tending to the puncture wounds. Ray isn’t crying, but Mikey can see in his eyes that the tears are coming. He usually isn’t afraid to cry, especially if it’s just in front of Mikey or the guys. But he’s clearly holding back right now.

Mikey just presses the cloth to the bite and stops trying to heal it. He can’t fucking heal it. He falls forward and hugs Ray.

Ray joins in with the crying then.

Of course they both know what happens now. Any bite that punctures the skin - even just one - changes you. He can already see that Ray is getting paler.

“This isn’t fair.” Mikeys voice sounds like a guttural sob. Ray wipes a tear away with his hand that isn’t grabbing onto Mikey, holding him close.

“I know.”

“But does anyone notice, but does anyone care / And if I had the guts to put this to your head”

“Mikey,” Ray says, slowly pulling one of his daggers out of his left combat boot. They’d stayed laying there and holding each other and crying for a bit. Time has passed. Time that they can’t really afford to lose.

“No.” Mikey says - he tries to sound firm but his voice is still all wobbly. They’re both pretty much cried out now, but Ray taking Mikeys hand and pressing the hilt of the weapon into his palm makes Mikey feel like he’ll maybe never run out of tears.

“You have to.”

Mikey just starts vigorously shaking his head. It sounds crazy, but he feels like maybe if he shakes his head fast enough and says no enough times this will all just undo itself, or they’ll rewind to hours ago when they were safe and sound, or everything will just stop. Anything to make it so that he doesn’t have to slit Ray's throat.

“Mikey, please,” Ray's voice breaks, which gets Mikey to look up from where he’d been staring at the hangnail on his thumb. “I… I can’t do it myself. I’m not strong like Grant was. I can’t.” Mikey doubles over and buries his face in Ray's chest. He accepts that he’s really not going to stop crying.

“Then- then we’ll both just lay here and, and you’ll turn and then you’ll bite me and we’ll be here together.” As he says it, he knows Ray is never going to allow that. He feels a big hand softly brushing through his hair.

“Gerard would kill me if I let anything happen to you. And then we’re just back at square one, huh?”

“But would anything matter if you’re already dead”

“Can’t I just… can’t I just wait till you turn and do it then. Ray, I can’t do it while you look like this. You look so alive.” Mikey distantly knows that his voice is all wrecked. But Ray could understand him if they were speaking different languages and underwater. That's what it’s always felt like.

“I’ll be faster and stronger and I’m not fucking risking that, Mikey. And I’m--” He breaks off there, taking in a shaky breath, maybe trying to collect himself. As if that’s fucking possible. “I’m already dead, Mikey. You know I’m as good as dead. You know that.” His words come out tremulous through clenched teeth, despite the effort.

Mikey lays an unsteady hand on Ray's cheek.

“I’m sorry, Ray. I really don’t think I can. I know I’m being selfish, I know, but. I don’t think I can kill you.”

“You’re not being selfish, and you’re not killing me. Those bastards out there, they killed me.”

Mikey just hugs Ray again, touching the wavy hair at the nape of his neck. They don’t have a lot of time left. He wishes he could wait it out. He knows he can’t.

“I keep thinking about Grant,” Ray breaks the moment's silence. “I wonder…”

Mikey shifts his head to look at Ray's eyes. They’re red and puffy but the tears have stopped again. “I wonder if it hurt for him.”

That gets Mikey to sit up.

“Hurt?” It’s not supposed to hurt. It’s supposed to be a painless forty minute transition. That was what they learned. What Grant taught them. The venom in the bite soothes the pain of the puncture, and the rest just doesn’t do anything painful to your body. Your soul just leaves. Your personality, your essence, your mind, whatever you wanna call it. The thing that makes you you and human. It doesn’t hurt when that leaves you.

“I know, it sounds weird. But it hurts. Not the bite, but… my chest burns. And my head feels like it’s spinning. Like the migraines I used to get as a kid.”

Mikey remembers when Ray would stay home from school because of bad headaches. He was always jealous that his friend was missing math. But if he brought Ray the homework at the end of the day, Mrs. Toro would make them both dinner and Ray and Mikey would sit on the couch and watch a movie on low volume with the lights off.

“And should I be shocked now by the last thing you said”

Mikey’s never been this close to someone while they were changing. None of them have, except for Grant. Their time must be coming to an end, because he sees Ray's eyes slowly going darker, his face going almost slack.

“Mikey,” He says, “It hurts. It really hurts.” the tears are back. He grabs Mikeys wrist, the one still loosely holding Ray's favorite dagger, and slowly drags it up to his own neck. “Please.”

Mikey feels like his whole face is trembling. He wants to slip out of his skin and into Rays. He wants to take the dagger and do this to himself instead. But Ray is in pain. He’s in pain and he’s asking Mikey to please do this and Mikey has always had a hard time saying no to him.

He grips the handle better and tries to sit himself up straight. He gently leads Ray's head to rest in his lap. He stares down into big brown eyes and a limp mouth all framed by soft curly hair. He swears he can see what's left of Ray slowly leaving his features. He purses his lips together and closes his eyes, holding the blade to Ray’s jugular.

“Mikeyway,” He hears, slurred and so faint that he almost mistakes it for the thrum of his heart beat, which is loud in his ears. Ray reaches a hand up and wipes away a tear that Mikey hadn’t even noticed on his cheekbone. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’ve loved you since I first knew you.” His voice doesn’t even sound like him anymore. It’s soft and almost deadpan. Like the personality has left it. Like emotion would be too exhausting to fit into his sentences.

Mikey pierces Ray’s throat only as his boyfriend’s hand falls from his cheek, not enough energy left in him to hold his arm up.

“Before I pull this trigger your eyes vacant and stained”

~~~

“And in saying you loved me made things harder at best”

Mikey walks back home the next morning, after holding Ray's lifeless body close to him all night, trying desperately to ignore how it was slowly going cold. As soon as he closes the front door behind him, he collapses into Gerard’s arms, Ray’s dried blood flaking off of his skin.

Frank is as confused as Gee. They both thought Mikey had been asleep in his bed. With Ray. At first they think maybe he snuck out early in the morning when the sun had first come up and none of them had noticed. It takes a painful amount of time for Mikey to explain what happened. Frank falls silent. Gerard gets mad. Really really mad.

He yells himself hoarse, screaming about how stupid it was to go out and how they both could’ve died and how would Frank and Gerard have been able to survive, just the two of them?

He shouts until Frank begs him to stop through tears. Then Gee just starts crying next to Mikey on the ratty old couch. Crying and saying sorry and that he doesn’t mean it and it’s no one's fault. No doubt reliving the last time something like this happened.

It doesn’t matter. Mikey wasn’t listening to Gerard’s cries anyways. He was just sitting there thinking about the last thing Ray said.

Of course they’d told each other they loved each other. Every day they’d say it. Ever since Grant died, and they all suddenly and irreversibly understood the urgency in telling those around you how you feel. Gerard never got to tell Grant his feelings.

So, yeah, Mikey and Ray had told each other how in love they were and they told each other exactly how they felt. But Ray never told Mikey that he’d felt like that for so long.

And that's all Mikey’s thinking about at the funeral, too, as Frank gives a little speech. They don’t have a real body to bury, obviously, but the world has adapted by creating a new tradition of burying the deceased's favorite weapon instead. (It's a pathetic gathering, really. Just the guys and Bob from next door, who comes over for dinner sometimes and brings his famous tomato salad. Ray deserves more. So much more.) While Gee is shoveling dirt back into the hole they dug for Ray's dagger, all Mikey can think about is how Ray had loved him for years before he knew.

Of course they all knew that Ray was crushing on Mikey a little bit when they were younger. But then the vamps came and all of that sort of thinking was pushed to the back of their minds. Then the Grant shit happened and Mikey realized he would have no fucking clue what to do with himself if that happened to Ray.

Ray had said “I love you” back right away. Mikey had been too distraught to sleep alone that night, and Gee was dissociating too much to sleep at all. So Ray laid down next to him and held Mikey to his chest and rubbed little circles into his back and whispered into his ear, things like “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay Mikey. You’re strong. We’re all strong.”

And so Mikey said “Ray, I love you,” just as he’d realized it was true. Ray had frozen up and said “No. You’re just saying that right now. You’re in shock.”

Mikey looked into Ray's eyes and said, “No, Ray. Seriously. I love you. Different from how I love Frank and Gee, I mean.”

And of course Ray hadn’t had it in him to smile - none of them did at the time - but he’d held Mikey a little closer and said “I love you too, Mikey Way. I love you so much.”

And that was that. Mikey figured Ray had fallen for him at some point in the few months leading up to when they confessed it - the same timeline that Mikey had found himself falling in love with Ray.

But it had been years.

Ray had said “I’ve loved you since I first knew you.” Mikey and Ray met in the sixth grade and instantly became best friends. But back then, Mikey had always still seen Frank as his right hand man, only after Gee. And all that time - Ray loved him.

Gee stands up from the burial spot and takes Frank’s place in front of everyone to speak.

“Mikey, when you came home yesterday morning, you mentioned that Ray said he was in pain in the end. I thought that was weird, since Grant had always told us that the change doesn’t hurt. So,” He clears his throat a little, but when he starts speaking again his voice is still wavering, “I, um. I went through Grant’s old journals for the first time since he left us.”

That got Mikey's attention. Gee has refused to let anyone touch Grant’s shit, even the journals, even though they could have tons of helpful information in them. All the shit that Grant still hadn’t gotten around to mentoring them in. Mikey can see the hurt in Gerard’s eyes and can tell he’s telling the truth. He went through them.

“There was a big section all about the change and turning and everything. It said that it doesn’t hurt almost anyone. Almost. But that… that that process does hurt to go through only if you’re near something that you’re mind is holding on to, something that you can’t bear to leave,” He says, “Ray must have been really holding onto you, Mikey.”

~~~

“And these words changing nothing as your body remains / and there's no room in this Hell there's no room in the next”

Before all of this Mikey thought that whole “in a better place” stuff was absolute horseshit. Dead was dead, there was no “better place”. But sitting there staring at the fresh dirt where he knows Ray's dagger is hidden, he can’t help but think to himself that death really is a better place, even if that place is nowhere.

Because for the first time, Mikey thinks that, yeah, being dead is better than living in this hell we have on Earth. At least it is when living is to not have Ray by his side.

So he lays down on the bed that he once shared with the love of his life, and wishes he were gone.

“And does anyone notice there's a corpse in this bed...”

**Author's Note:**

> leave a comment so i don't die of boredom and loneliness in this quarantine please


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